


Checkmate

by roseluu (rowanscrown)



Series: We'll Nearly Fall [2]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Implied/Referenced Cheating, M/M, minor gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-04
Updated: 2017-08-04
Packaged: 2018-12-10 11:23:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11690607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rowanscrown/pseuds/roseluu
Summary: Alfred thinks of it as a game.





	Checkmate

**Author's Note:**

> Companion to Blue Garden.

Alfred thinks of it as a game.

There are pawns; there are opponents and defenders; there are goals and crowns; and, there is a treasure to win.

Pawns. Pawns he doesn’t care about using: technology, land, money. Pawns he cares about: family. Goals: power. Crown: Arthur. Treasure.

He isn’t sure what the treasure is.

He doesn’t care about that right now. Treasure always finds its way into someone’s hand, and he hopes the game plays out so it’ll be his.

The Game: Find the Treasure.

The Pawns will stay, he will protect them. The Crown will be thrown away at the sight of Treasure. The Goal will be reached. The Game will end.

Alfred sometimes thinks he’s playing the wrong game.

*

He has the same dream, once every week.

He’s walking through the woods with a musket. His eyes water from the acrid stench of smoke and gunpowder. There are people, bloodied corpses, at his feet. One of them is Gilbert, bullets puddled around his chest. Francis is there, too, face down, and he doesn’t take any step closer to him to turn him over.

Another one of them is Matthew. Matthew with his red coat tattered and tied around his wrists and his bloodied clothes torn. In the dream, he stops and asks Matthew if he’s okay. Matthew’s glassy eyes stare, mouth slack.

He sees Arthur last. At the base of a nearby tree, of all places, clawing at the trunk. He’s wrapped in a moss green cape, coat thrown to the side, and there’s blood slicked over his skin. Alfred steps over the bodies to get to him, and says, “What are you doing?”

Arthur whirls around, eyes wide. Underneath the cape, he’s naked and bruised and purple and blue, and he scrambles to press himself to the tree. “You! You – You’re here!”

“Yes.” He steps forward, but Arthur’s face twists to gnash his teeth before turning, raking his nails down the tree again. It makes a squishing, wet sound, coated with blood and soaked bark. Arthur begins to mutter.

“Would you stop that?” Alfred says.

“I can’t,” is solid through the hysteria. “I can’t. I can’t. I have to get him down.”

Alfred glances up. An arm is hanging from one of the branches, connected to what must be a body buried in the leaves.

Behind them, a rabbit skitters by.

“Stop that!” Alfred lurches forward to grab Arthur’s spindly arms, yanking him away. Arthur squirms to face him, pressing against his chest. He cards his red fingers through his hair, kisses him with teeth and saliva and groans wantonly.

Then Arthur begins to scream, thrashing against him, but Alfred won’t let go, not until Arthur’s sobbing and for Alfred to just  _come back, please, please come back, please –_

Every time he wakes up from this dream, he doesn’t drink coffee.

*

There are few things Alfred hates:

1\. Tea. Many of his people love tea, but he doesn’t. It feels wrong and tastes like too-sweet honey mixed with bland water. When he was younger, it filled him up too fast and left his tongue dry like sandpaper.

2\. Reading literature. He’d read to much Shakespeare, too much Oscar Wilde and Bryon while growing up.

3\. Candles. Just use a lamp, for God’s sake. It’s the twenty-first century.

4\. Arthur.

He doesn’t make this mental list until he’s grown. He jots them down in his mind, mumbling them behind his hands during a meeting, eyeing up explanations and reasons.

He can’t find an explanation for number four. Everything else on his list has a reason, but Arthur doesn’t. Nothing about his occupation, his childhood, the Revolution, industrialization, the World Wars. Nothing.

This is the day he realizes what Arthur is to him.

*

Matthew wasn’t happy when Alfred asked him to join.

Arthur wasn’t there that night. Arthur had spoken about a bad feeling. Ominous. But, loyalty ran too deep within Alfred’s people. Arthur had fallen without conviction.

“Do you realize what you’re planning? You’re going to ruin everything. You’re going to  _kill_  yourself!”

Matthew rarely becomes angry, but when he does he's whiny and unashamed. Even more so as he grows desperate. He doesn’t understand that Alfred is offering him an escape from the carnage that was growing deadlier every day.

“You can’t rebel against our military, Alfred. They’ll shoot your people down without a thought! Who knows what Arthur will do!”

Alfred laughs in his face. Matthew's takes a step back, creaking the floorboards. The heat on the nape of Alfred’s neck is blossoming into something untamed.

“He wouldn’t lay a hand on me, and you know it,” he says.

Matthew’s eyes widen, and behind them his bear kicks at the door Alfred had locked.

“I’m not you,” he continues. “I’m not a loyal dog. We’re not children anymore, Mattie. It’s time for us to leave.”

Matthew’s fists curl at his sides. As if his anger seeped through his skin and ran through the air, the glowing orange candle flickers from their bedside table. “Think about the consequences. You can’t assume you’ll win. They can’t be defeated.”

“Maybe I won’t win,” he admits. “But in the end, it’ll be worth it.”

“Worth it? _Worth it_ _?_  That’s what you think about this?” Matthew spits. “What about Arthur? It'll destroy him if you leave! You’re going to tear him apart!”

The heat digs into his spine. Suddenly, Matthew’s on the ground, and Alfred’s wringing his collar, straddling him. “ _You’re_  the idiot!  _You’re_  the ignorant one!  _You’re_  the one straying away from what he’s inflicting on my people. He’s the one ruining everything, and if destroying him with make it stop, then I'll do it!”

Matthew sneers, “He hasn’t any control over that! He has no say!”

“No say?  _We_  have no say!” He grips tighter. Matthew’s fingers scrabble to his hands. “He doesn’t care for us. Can’t you see that? He doesn’t  _care_. We’re here to use for power. He  _lies_  to us, Mattie. He  _lies_.”

“He loves us! He loves  _you_!”

Matthew’s head cracks against the ground and a cry fills the air. Everything burns as his fingers coil and squeeze and yank, shivering from choked inhales. When the spark pops, he lets go, and Matthew groans and rolls to the side, clutching his head.

“You’re pathetic,” he says.

A pawn he cared about is lost. You aren’t supposed to lose pawns.

*

He sometimes thinks about Ivan.

Friends to hatred back to something in between. Whenever Alfred would speak with him, albeit briefly, he has a fleeting thought wondering what happened to him.

Because, sometimes, Ivan reminds him of Arthur.

He doesn’t ask. Gilbert has spouted convictions of being a psychopath. Toris answered a clipped, “He’s lonely” when asked about it, and Sadiq mentioned something about Mongolians. Alfred didn’t care to listen, but Ivan is useful at times, so when their alone out drinking after a meeting, he asks, “Why are you so bad upstairs, anyway?”

Ivan, of course, smiles and cocks his head. “What do you mean?”

“You know. How you’re crazy and shit. Why is that?”

Ivan is more drunk than usual. Alfred has an inkling that maybe downing vodka is what makes him smile twenty-four-seven in the first place. Ivan slurs the slightest bit as he answers, “I do not think I am crazy. Do you think that?”

 _Don’t even answer_. Alfred sips from his beer. “Then why’re you scary?”

“Ah! You think I’m scary?”

“I don’t,” he says hotly. “If you don’t think you’re crazy  _or_  scary, then what do you think you are?”

Ivan’s smile stays. “I think I am lonely.”

And that’s all he says. Maybe Toris hadn’t been lying.

It sends Alfred’s mind back to square one.

*

Nazi Germany attacks.

Alfred talks to Arthur again.

He’s being led closer to the treasure. He knows it. Arthur’s hand is blistered when they shake hands, and his eyes are cold. Alfred wants to laugh. The last time he saw those eyes, they were crying for him to come back and stay.

The exchange goes smoothly. Alfred quite likes Arthur’s new Queen. This Queen has that  _look_. When she looks at him, she knows. And since she knows, Alfred is more eager.

Being with Arthur isn’t what he’d thought it would be. Arthur isn’t a brat. He doesn’t talk back. Contrary, he seems to enjoy himself. But, every time his eyes roll into somewhere far-away, Alfred makes sure to bring him back.

The Crown is set.

Lying in bed with Arthur isn’t as fun, though, because he turns his back and begins to shake when he thinks Alfred’s asleep. He gets up, wraps himself in a robe, and slips outside to the balcony. Alfred rolls over and watches. Arthur taps his fingers against the dark railing in a sharp rhythm, like someone was yanking his fingers down onto piano keys. In his other hand, he cradles a cigarette. Smoke sinks from his lips.

Alfred has never seen Arthur smoke. Arthur  _doesn’t_  smoke.

This is the moment the crackling heat at his neck leaves, and something in his stomach curls, like it had the moment he dropped his finger from the gun aimed at Arthur’s head.

This is the moment he begins to think Matthew was right.

He tells himself he doesn’t care.

*

Matthew has never told him what happened in England when he left.

Matthew whispers, “You shouldn’t act as if you know everything, Alfred. What you’re doing is just going to kill you in the end.”

“So, what, I can’t sleep with him?”

“You’re already in love with him, so I don’t see why you don’t understand.”

“I’m not in love with him. Who the hell would be?”

“You’re a pig, Al. A fucking pig.” Matthew runs a hand through his hair. “Maybe it’s just a personal preference, but I’d never sleep with someone I knew nothing about. And I surely wouldn’t be sleeping with someone else while doing it.”

*

The Game gets out of hand.

First, humans. Women. They’re pretty and pleasing and don’t ever ask questions when he doesn’t answer calls or leave in the early hours. Then men.

Then Ivan. He doesn’t remember much.

Then Francis.

Francis had come to tell him something. As soon as "Arthur" left his lips, Alfred was gone, and Francis wasn’t unhappy about his advances.

And Arthur. In between.

*

The nights in the sheets, when Arthur is out of them, the curling in his stomach begins. It isn’t unlike the tightening in his ears, or the spark at his neck, but it’s different.

Suddenly, the curling is unbearable, and the game isn’t fun anymore.

5\. Being a hypocrite.

6\. Loving Arthur.

The Arthur in bed is too nice, too compliant. He knows that. He’s always known that. Matthew was right. This will only end badly for the both of them.

The night Arthur threatens to kill him is when he finds an explanation for number four.

He wants to see it again. He wants to see that spark consuming Arthur. The spark that had him losing control with hunger for treasure. Arthur had once been a pirate, hadn’t he? Then he knows. Alfred is beginning to fall into the reason for his dreams, and the want for something else than Arthur’s body.

And besides, he likes the real Arthur. The one that doesn't hesitate to hold a knife to his throat.


End file.
